What You Must Know about Creating Effective Landing Pages

The term landing page is one of the most commonly used terms in the world of online marketing today, but what does it really mean and what can you do to ensure that your landing page is as effective as possible?

First, understand what a landing page is. In terms of marketing, a landing page is a specialized page where visitors arrive once they have clicked on an ad or a link. In developing your landing pages, keep the following questions in mind:

What product or service are you going to offer on the page?

Who is your target audience?

Why would a lead be interested?

What will the visitor need to do to make a purchase?

Effective landing pages should always include a call to action, but Unbounce reports that 49 percent of businesses fail to optimize the number of CTAs used on their landing pages. Ideally, a call to action should be positioned near the top of the landing page. Keep in mind that there are a lot of impulsive people out there. Don’t make them read through the entire page before you make your pitch and tell them what they need to do to make a purchase or participate. Of course, it is also a good idea to sprinkle some calls to action throughout the rest of the landing page, but do not overlook placing one near the top of the page. In addition, ensure that your calls to action are linked to a subscription form or order page.

One of the most common problems that many people encounter when developing landing pages is that they tend to become too wordy. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, only 16 percent of people actually read a website word by word. To cater to that, it is important that you use scannable text on your landing page by using the following:

Bulleted lists

Highlighted words and hypertext links

Sub-headings

Bite-size chunks of information

Keep in mind that pages can load at different speeds for different users. The longer that your landing page takes to load, the more likely it is that the visitor will lose patience and you will lose them. KissMetrics reports that 47 percent of consumers expect web pages to load within two seconds or less. Even a one-second delay could result in a 7 percent decline in conversions. There are some steps you can take to reduce your page-load time. For instance, images tend to be the leading cause of slow performance. One option is to use a script, such as Adaptive Images, that will identify your visitors’ screen sizes and then re-scale your website images based on your visitor’s needs. Another option is to use a tool, such as Smush.It to compress your site’s resources.